I have voted exactly three times in my life. The first was in 1984 when I was a college sophomore. I knew I didn’t like Ronald Reagan and the trickle-down theories he claimed would save America. But his challenger, Michael Dukakis, was about as appealing as cold canned soup. Still, I voted for Dukakis as a registered democrat despite an openly verbalized threat to register as communist. A ROTC student who overhead me didn’t think my attempt at Cold War humor was especially funny. That shit could come back and haunt you.

I did not vote again for a long time after that. But I did change my registration to independent. I liked the indeterminacy, the way it telegraphed my I’m-no-joiner beliefs. While also suggesting my disdain for the two-party system, the lack of meaningful candidate choices, and the lesser-of-two-evils attitude so many took when voting. I was of the system (because what the hell else was there) but not partaking in it. If I had a political statement, abstention was it.

The next time I voted was in 2012. A lot had happened between then and 1984. We were in a new millennium; I was now middle-aged and living in Dallas, still wondering how I wound up in Texas. I had been working as an adjunct professor for a year and scrapping by. It wasn’t my idea of success. But it was a damn sight better than the 18 months of unemployment I’d seen and survived because I’d written for spare change tossed from newspapers and marketing firms.

That time I voted because was grateful to the man running for a second term. I’d liked him in 2008 but remained skeptical enough that I stayed on the sidelines. This time was different. Yes there had been the debacles in Afghanistan and Libya. And yes, the Obama administration had managed to drive up the national debt. But part of that debt had come from helping people during the Great Recession who lost jobs and homes. People like me. I had come back to the US after a job I’d taken abroad had disappeared. And had the bad luck to become ill enough to need surgery. The organization that helped find me get back up again had received funds from government grant money. On Election Day 2012, I walked to the polling place near the downtown community college campus where I worked and hit the button for Barack Obama.

I stayed out of all the elections that followed; my Obama vote in 2012 had been a one off. Then things got strange. In 2016 an idiot orange clown managed to get on the ballot. Like a lot of people, I didn’t take the clown seriously. The other candidate, a smart, competent woman—but also one with an unfortunate vapor trail of scandal following her—would win. I still didn’t believe in the system but felt sure things would be just fine without me; surely everyone could see just how ridiculous the idiot clown was. Until he got elected and all the people we thought we knew let loose the crazy and joined his circus from hell.

But did I vote in 2020 when the orange man ran again? No. I liked Joe Biden and his decency. But his age scared me: could a man born before the Baby Boom really have the kind of vision needed to face the challenges of a new world? Two years into Biden’s presidency and the never-ending crises that continue to plague America and the world, I woke up. Biden meant well. But the everything including the earth had changed; former rules—and attitudes—no longer applied. I could remain uninvolved because the country had stability to spare. Whatever else I chose to believe, the democracy that had helped create that stability had been savaged from within the United States and without. Voting had been the taken-for-granted thing I believed would always be there. Until I witnessed the imposition of voting rights restrictions on poor, dark-skinned Texans. Then saw Texas women lose their right to abortion after the Supreme Court gutted Roe v. Wade in 2022.

It was too much, even for a Generation X political unbeliever. And so, days after the fall of Roe, I registered to vote. And when I didn’t hear back from the County Registrar after more than a month, I registered again. Another Gen Xer, Beto O’Rourke, was trying to unseat the man who had signed the voter restriction laws into place. And done other things, like refuse to take action on the vulnerable state power grid after Winter Storm Uri turned Texas into a national disaster and disgrace. Or reconsider his second amendment purism after the 2022 Uvalde school massacre.

The press conference held after Uvalde, where an outraged O’Rourke stood up and told Abbott not once but several times that this is on you, stayed with me like the hangover from a nightmare. The image of the Texas governor, wearing a dark law enforcement-style shirt and his entourage, wearing uniforms, badges and other symbols of police power, seemed too-horribly surreal. This is America not a totalitarian state. So I voted the hell out a 52-issue ballot, feeling powerful in my rebellion against Abbott’s quiet show of authoritarianism. I celebrated with a photo that went up on my Facebook page; and that I’d captioned Generation X’s finest hour. I had entered the fray and left my apathy behind.

The allusion to Winston Churchill had been an accident: in the moment it had made sense. And sounded oh so hip and fierce. Later I realized that it was far more apt than I realized. Churchill had spoken of Britain entering its “finest hour” four days before France officially became Nazi-occupied territory in 1940. With no continental power as ally, Britain stood alone to face Hitler’s incursions. Yet Churchill persevered with almost impossible optimism: During the first four years of the last war the Allies experienced,...nothing but disaster and disappointment…During that war we repeatedly asked ourselves the question, ‘How are we going to win?’ and no one was able ever to answer it with much precision, until at the end, quite suddenly, quite unexpectedly, our terrible foe collapsed before us.

I don’t like to think of Republicans/conservatives like Abbott as “foes.” If there are enemies among us, it’s the extremists on both the right and the left. Together they have helped deepen the divides among Americans to the point where no one trusts anyone else. Where the moderation of reason and civil discourse has become past tense. I don’t have an answer for how to get us out of all the trouble we’re in, both here at home and across the globe. But it comforts me to know that Churchill didn’t, either. All he had was his trademark bulldog tenacity and faith in the democratic system. Which he once said was actually the worst form of government “except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”

Yes, democracy can be a godawful mess because nothing is perfect including the human beings that created it. But—and speaking as a cynical Gen Xer looking for something worthwhile enough to believe in—it’s the closest thing we’ve got to hope. And the thing most worth saving in a troubled world.

I am a more or less well-adjusted—if at times slightly neurotic—cat lady. The feisty two-year old tabby who turned me into one steals socks and rubber doorstop bumpers and annoys the hell out of me on a daily basis. She’s laid waste to shoes, curtains and doorjambs with claws that grow back as fast as I can cut them. And she talks back whenever I scold her. But I freely chose this tender and conniving little savage as a companion and wouldn’t have it any other way.

The stereotypical cat lady is middle-aged or older, though sometimes she can be young. She is childless and without husband or partner; almost always she lives alone, a social outcast. Like the two down-at-the-heel Edies in Grey Gardens, she has several cats she smothers with cooing, cloying affection. If she isn’t lonely and bitter, she’s usually half mad or worse and almost always the butt of jokes. Of course, the cat lady intrigues me; she’s the ultimate contrarian who descends from a long line of female disruptors of the status quo.

I wonder if she doesn’t exist as a reminder of lost power. Or power contained but forgotten. Egyptians saw felines as bringers of good fortune to anyone who housed them and worshipped a cat-headed domestic goddess named Bastet The Vikings used felines to keep their ships free of rodents; their war goddess Freya used two cats to pull her chariot. In ancient China the cat-goddess Li Shou symbolized fertility and ruled the world after it was first created. When she stepped away from that responsibility and lost the power of speech, her purring remained, a reminder that she controlled the machinery that moved the earth.

Christianity is largely to blame for demonizing both women and cats. The thirteenth century pope Gregory IX claimed Satan often assumed the form of a cat. Not surprisingly, single females, widows and other marginalized females—many of whom owned felines—became targets of medieval/early modern European and colonial American witch hunters. Women after all were descendants of Eve, the one who first gave ear to Satan. How could they and their evil, slant-eyed pets ever be trusted?

The hysteria and persecution went on for centuries. After the last witch-burning in 1811, single women with cats became figures of contempt. They were social rule-breakers, financial liabilities to their relatives. Jane Austen, who chose spinsterhood, knew this well. So did her female characters: in a society where women had few rights to call their own, it was marriage or bust. By the late nineteenth century, the suffrage movement once again called attention to the woman-feline connection. In Britain, anti-female suffrage groups used cat images to belittle suffragettes. Voting women—who by that time were also demanding greater economic equality—was as ridiculous a concept as voting cats.

Selena Kyle—the 80-year-old comic book character also known as Catwoman—is one figure that complicates the stereotype. Most know her as an infamous thief and one of Batman’s long-time Gotham City adversaries. But beneath the skin-tight black suit and mask is an adoring cat lady who has cared for everything from giant panthers to strays. She even named one of her favorite females Hecate after the Greek goddess of sorcery. I like to think Selina Kyle remembers witches, remembers their fate, finding ways to charm or evade those who mean her harm.

Her alter-ego Catwoman exists on the fringes of society not as a pitiable outcast but as a thief and virtuoso criminal. Rather than keep to herself and her cats, she engages with the world, albeit in violent ways, often wielding a bullwhip. She is the cat lady who has reclaimed power and her sexuality, which she does not hesitate to use to get what—or who—she wants, including Batman, the man she eternally loves and hates. Modern in her complexity, she represents the struggles of women living in a world that still does not see or respect them as whole human beings.

These days it’s actually males who are more likely to own cats than women. And they are in good company. Abraham Lincoln and T.S. Eliot were also self-professed also cat lovers. Lincoln was the first American president to bring cats—and not a few strays— into the White House. He also made a habit of talking to them. Eliot dedicated an entire book of verse, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, to musings on the multiple faces of feline roguery. Yet neither of these men—nor any other I’ve known who’ve kept felines—were ever called cat men. Let alone crazy cat men.

And that’s very fine. There’s strength in claiming scorned titles, in knowing something about the histories no one ever discusses. And knowing that beneath the most seemingly harmless exterior lies a fury and wildness not even the most placid of lives can ever fully domesticate.